Related papers: The statistical analysis of acoustic phonetic data…
The way speakers articulate is well known to be variable across individuals while at the same time subject to anatomical and biomechanical constraints. In this study, we ask whether articulatory strategy in vowel production can be…
Discovering and quantifying the drivers of language change is a major challenge. Hypotheses about causal factors proliferate, but are difficult to rigorously test. Here we ask a simple question: can 20th Century changes in English English…
Languages vary considerably in syntactic structure. About 40% of the world's languages have subject-verb-object order, and about 40% have subject-object-verb order. Extensive work has sought to explain this word order variation across…
The traditional approach to morphological inflection (the task of modifying a base word (lemma) to express grammatical categories) has been, for decades, to consider lexical entries of lemma-tag-form triples uniformly, lacking any…
We use tensor analysis techniques for high-dimensional data to gain insight into pitch curves, which play an important role in linguistics research. In particular, we propose that demeaned phonetics pitch curve data can be modeled as having…
Variation in speech is often quantified by comparing phonetic transcriptions of the same utterance. However, manually transcribing speech is time-consuming and error prone. As an alternative, therefore, we investigate the extraction of…
Sound correspondence patterns form the basis of cognate detection and phonological reconstruction in historical language comparison. Methods for the automatic inference of correspondence patterns from phonetically aligned cognate sets have…
Speech enhancement has seen great improvement in recent years using end-to-end neural networks. However, most models are agnostic to the spoken phonetic content. Recently, several studies suggested phonetic-aware speech enhancement, mostly…
The similarity of the evolution of human languages (or alphabets, bird songs, >...) to biological evolution of species is utilized to study with up to $10^9$ people the rise and fall of languages either by macroscopic differential equations…
It is widely accepted that information derived from analyzing speech (the acoustic signal) and language production (words and sentences) serves as a useful window into the health of an individual's cognitive ability. In fact, most…
Listeners adapt language comprehension based on their mental representations of speakers, but how these representations are updated remains unclear. We investigated whether listeners probabilistically adapt comprehension based on the…
Recent years have brought great advances into solving morphological tasks, mostly due to powerful neural models applied to various tasks as (re)inflection and analysis. Yet, such morphological tasks cannot be considered solved, especially…
We introduce a neural auto-encoder that transforms the musical dynamic in recordings of singing voice via changes in voice level. Since most recordings of singing voice are not annotated with voice level we propose a means to estimate the…
This paper revisits Menzerath's Law, also known as the Menzerath-Altmann Law, which models a relationship between the length of a linguistic construct and the average length of its constituents. Recent findings indicate that simple…
The aim of this study is to determine the effect of language varieties on the spectral distribution of stressed and unstressed sonorants (nasals /m, n/, lateral approximants /l/, and rhotics /r/) and on their coarticulatory effects on…
This paper presents a novel treebank-driven approach to comparing syntactic structures in speech and writing using dependency-parsed corpora. Adopting a fully inductive, bottom-up method, we define syntactic structures as delexicalized…
This paper compares a qualitative reasoning model of translation with a quantitative statistical model. We consider these models within the context of two hypothetical speech translation systems, starting with a logic-based design and…
Multilingual automatic speech recognition (ASR) systems mostly benefit low resource languages but suffer degradation in performance across several languages relative to their monolingual counterparts. Limited studies have focused on…
State-of-the-art automatic speech recognition (ASR) systems struggle with the lack of data for rare accents. For sufficiently large datasets, neural engines tend to outshine statistical models in most natural language processing problems.…
The geographical pattern of human dialects is a result of history. Here, we formulate a simple spatial model of language change which shows that the final result of this historical evolution may, to some extent, be predictable. The model…